Jake Parrick Month 1 | An Author’s Journey to Publication

Hello and welcome. This is the first article in what is going to be a monthly post documenting the things that I’m doing as I work up to my Kickstarter Campaign.

My website is almost complete, I still need to get an author photo taken, and my author services page still needs work. Right now I’m concentrating on getting content up so I can start ranking on google. I knew that I needed to start blogging, easy right? It wasn’t until I sat down to start writing that I realized I had no idea what I was supposed to blog about. I wrote an 800-page Epic Fantasy book with dozens of intertwining plot lines and at least twelve major characters, but I couldn’t string more than three words together for a blog article.

Funny huh?

So I read a great article about building your traffic and it gave me a place to start. The advice? Write about what the people who are going to read your book already read about. So I took that advice, wrote a long list of cool subjects that my future readers might find interesting, then ignored it lol.

I didn’t ignore it on purpose, and it’s not that I don’t find those subjects interesting, it’s just that I personally find other things more interesting.

Yes, I could write an article that ranks the worst Fantasy villains of all time, or give a history lesson on the Sith Empire, and I am not saying that those articles are never going to get written. In fact, there is a good chance that the article about the history of the Sith Empire will get written.

Another subject that I chose was a primer on self-publishing, The Authors Club. It probably wasn’t the best subject to write about, but it is a subject that I’m passionate about and it is also something that I have learned a great deal about over the past year. I decided to write on this subject for a couple reasons, the first is what I said above, I’m passionate about it. The second reason is that in my own journey to learn this industry I have come across a great deal of information, a lot of it contradictory. I wanted to provide a place where other Independent Authors could come to find the resources they need. Lastly, this subject has served as a way to keep everything that I learned fresh in my mind and provided a central place to keep all my notes.

The third category I chose is more of a cop-out on my part. To rank on google you need to have content up, lots of content. Book reviews are a very easy way to get original content onto your website. I have literally read thousands of books in my life, so it’s easy to write about it.

That concludes this month’s article, thanks for reading, checkout my new cover :).

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When Jake isn’t writing about Fallen Angels, Lizard People, or bad-ass Atlantean Knights wearing powered assault armor and killing the before mentioned Fallen Angels and Lizard People; he can usually be found in his secret bunker carefully calibrating the surface-to-air missile defense system…
Just Kidding.
I live in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, on an island in the Puget Sound. When we want to leave the island we go down to the beach, and so long as our offering is sufficient, an Orca will give us a ride to the mainland.
My blog is devoted to a few things: history, mythology, and my book.